Fear the Wicked (Illusions Series Book 2)(25)

The pain returned with phantom fingers tracing each welt, each cut, each bruise to both my body and ego. Pushing forward wasn't easy, but I forced one foot in front of the other, the sound of the soles of my shoes against the tiled floors counting down my penance for having ever been a young man.

While walking me to the front doors of the large parish, Father Timothy had spoken carefully. His choice of words, his tone while speaking them, his patience in delivering a cryptic message, still haunted me as I entered the family room that had surrounded four people who were never a true family.



"You were a priest, Jacob. You understand how we're bound to remain silent regarding a person's confession to God. But what I can tell you is that God wasn't the only person to whom your father confessed his sins. You just have to dig deep enough to find it."



I still couldn't wrap my head around what he'd been trying to say, couldn't think past the deafening white noise that reverberated in my brain as I drove the lonely miles to my childhood home. Even now, that noise threatened to crush me, especially in the moments where it became clear enough for me to hear the whispers.



"What if he finds out, Jacob?"

"He won't find out."

"But, what if..."



My eyes darted to a corner of the room, to the place where Jericho and I used to play with the toys deemed appropriate by my parents. Our father was a doctor and had many books on human anatomy. Jericho and I had found one in particular quite curious. Sneaking the book out of my father's office hadn't been easy. Hiding it in plain sight in our toy corner had been dumb. But somehow my mother never stumbled upon it while dragging a vacuum over the carpets, had never noticed the corner peeking out beneath a pile of Lincoln Logs piled haphazardly on the floor beside their bucket.



“But, what if...”



We were nothing but small boys who wondered about the usual things. How can a bird fly and defeat gravity? How is it possible for a fish to breathe underwater? Why was our mother's body different than our father's, and why did she always keep herself so fully covered?

That book taught us in graphic detail how women differed from men. I remember feeling nothing when I first looked at the pages, my tiny fingers running down the paper over areas much different than what I had seen when standing naked in front of a mirror. It was an idle curiosity, nothing more, but my father didn't agree.



"That's Satan speaking inside you, boy! Drop your pants, let me show you what the good lord created your body for."



It was the first time I fought back. I wasn't able to sit again for a week. He beat me until blood seeped from the wounds his belt had left on my ass. Those images were cemented in my head by his violence...my need to strike out at the very thing that caused me so much pain.

I still liked to inflict that pain, loved hearing them moan and beg for more.

Fuck, how he'd made me crawl. Over carpets, and tile, over wood flooring and the small, hidden, unfinished room he kept inside the basement. The dirt from the floor of that room would always jam itself beneath my fingernails. It would leach inside my open wounds, would kick up into dusty clouds that tickled my nose while I wept. I'd been locked away so many times, that room had become my haven.

Perhaps that's why the darkness crawled inside me. Perhaps I spent so much time locked in shadow, it pulled the dark parts out. The last time I remembered being shoved inside, the light diminishing as he closed the door, was when I was fourteen. I'd broken the door down with angry fists, marched up the stairs to find mom cooking at the stove, and I'd eyed my father where he sat reading his Bible to tell him, "Never again."

The beatings stopped for me that day, but they continued for Jericho.

Turning right, I passed the overstuffed couch where my family often sat to watch television. Never movies or sitcoms, cartoons, or educational shows, the only flickering pictures we got to watch were religious sermons. My father's faith was so resolute that he swore the good Lord resided inside him.



"Do you know how many lives I've saved? How God himself works through me to give my patients life? How dare you question me, boy? I can give life and I can take it away."



There was a time I believed my father saw himself as God, and it wasn't until I walked inside his office that I realized where Jericho might have gotten it.



"So, God sent Christ down to help man, but Christ chose the Kingdom of Heaven as his home. He abandoned mankind when he died. He left us in the Devil's dominion."

"Keep going."

"So, God sent another Christ. And that Christ will eradicate sin and teach us to fight it. To destroy it if we believe in him."

"I told you that?"



Eve had nodded yes to the question.



"And who is the new Christ?"

“You.”



Jericho thought he was God, too. At least, according to what Eve had told me that morning in the parish kitchen while I cooked her breakfast.



No. Not Jericho.



Elijah thought he was God.



The light flared on when my hand hit the switch, anger coursing through me like a tidal wave, crushing me and dragging me until I was hopelessly lost in the undertow, drowning beneath an angry, churning sea.